HELP or HELP to: What do corpora have to say?

Abstract

In this paper, we will examine a range of factors that may potentially influence a language user's choice of a full or bare infinitive following HELP. The factors include language variety, language change, spoken/written distinction, semantic distinction, and syntactic conditions, namely, an intervening noun phrase or adverbial, the number of intervening words, to preceding HELP, the passive construction, inflections of HELP, and it as the subject. Six corpora are used in this paper, four written corpora (LOB, Brown, FLOB and Frown) and two spoken corpora (the speech section of the BNC and the Corpus of Professional Spoken American English, CPSA).